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The time for decision by our judiciary has come:

Chrysler LLC creditors asked a U.S. Supreme Court justice to block the carmaker from selling its assets as early as tomorrow to a group led by Italy’s Fiat SpA.

Indiana pension funds that lent Chrysler money said in papers filed late yesterday that they will seek a Supreme Court review of a ruling allowing the sale. The funds asked Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg for an order blocking the transfer until the high court decides whether to hear the funds’ appeal.

“Absent a stay, the sale will close on Monday, June 8, 2009,” the funds said in their court papers, filed in Washington. They said they would suffer “irreparable harm” should the sale go forward.

It is the most important property case since Kelo v. New London, and in some ways more significant, not only because it is larger, but because it will send a poweful message–irrespective of the outcome–as to how U.S. courts handle contracts and obligations.

If our government can by fiat break these, our commercial system will be broken in the process.

The European left can’t get traction in the current depression:

Yet as Europe goes to the polls, left-leaning parties across the continent are looking likely to falter. That’s true both for those in government, such as in the U.K. and Spain, and in the opposition — such as France, Germany and Italy.

France’s Socialist Party is trying hard to rally voters ahead of Sunday’s European parliamentary elections. “Let’s unite with all the French who contest free market, unfair policies that aim at deregulating everything,” party leader Martine Aubry urged at a pre-election rally.

Yet less than 20% of voters say they plan to cast their ballot for the Socialist Party, according to recent surveys. That would be a weak performance considering France’s main opposition party got 29% of the votes in the last European parliamentary elections.

In Germany, the Social Democrats are expected to get only around 26% on Sunday, consistent with their low opinion-poll ratings ahead of Germany’s national elections in September. Italy’s center-left Partito Democratico is expected to get a similar percentage.

One reason is that as Europe tipped into recession, the right moved left — appropriating some of the left’s long-standing economic policies, including nationalizations and bailouts.

I made the following statement last November:

It’s fair to say that the Republican Party is history as a national party in the U.S.

Oh, it’s true that it will continue to be an important regional party, and certainly the party of choice for Caucasian Evangelicals.  But as a national party, its continuance is impossible.  Although American history buffs may look to the Whig split over slavery before the Civil War as a fitting historical precedent, a more relevant analogy is the transition from Liberal to Labour Party in the UK as the predominant left wing party, a transition driven by social changes…

Under these circumstances, Europeans may be satisfied with parties differentiated by nuance.  But over here, with our rigid “winner take all” system, single-party hegemony will be the preferred expression.  We have seen this before (remember the “Solid South?”)

Evidently the Europeans are having their doubts as well.  (The UK is a simple problem of poor leadership, IMHO, otherwise the Torys would still be in the doghouse.)

The basic problem is the nature of our modern society: corporatist to the core, the first hurdle that opposition parties have–left or right–is to make the case that we need a competitive system to start with.

Western societies in general are running scared.  Their elites, who in their hearts don’t believe in the civilisation that put them there, fear that a really competitive system would turn them out of power for good.  That explains the slavish syncophancy of the American media (or, as Bernie Goldberg delightfully puts it, its slobbering love affair) towards Barack Obama, syncophancy which rivals the state controlled organs of Communist parties of old.

The rest of us, indoctrinated in the idea that advance is only in terms of moving up a credentialled ladder, fear that a political shift would push the ladder away from the wall, and us with it.  The weak economy only underscores this.

But you can’t have a true representative democracy without a competitive party system (or something like it.)  One-party systems (de facto or de jure) have the form of democracy, but deny the power thereof.  Perhaps that’s one reason Obama didn’t push democracy in the Middle East.  It’s a wise move by itself, but why should he promote something abroad he (and his flunkies like Ram Emmanuel, David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs) regard as a positive nuisance at home?

In Europe the ability of a country’s elites to centralise power has always been greater than the US, which is why American elites are so in love with Europe.  But the Europeans have been able to perpetuate a pas de deux (or more, in the case of France and Italy) which meant that competitive political systems were, in reality, sophisticated games of musical chairs.  (The French Fourth Republic was the classic study of this.)  But now, as Don McLean sang, the music has died, obviously on both sides of the Atlantic.

The sad article in the L.A. Times about our fading legacy in the Pacific brought many things to mind, especially for someone whose father fought in that theatre.  From the time that FDR, with the usual British connaivance, decided to put the main emphasis on the European theatre, World War II in the Pacific has always been “second best,” and the legacy of deteriorating monuments–Pearl Harbour excepted–is a classic example of this.

But this is a mistake.

I finally got to watch the entirety of Victory at Sea, the epic documentary of World War II’s naval and amphibious battles.  It was my father’s favourite television show, and now I know why.  Set to Richard Rogers’ music, it’s a compelling view; it puts the war in a different perspective, one what was originally watched by veterans whose memories were fresh.  Although it covered naval action in both theatres, because of the nature of the war the series leaned more on the Pacific.

This series, along with others and other research, has convinced me that World War II in Europe was the war of the past and World War II in the Pacific was the war of the future.  Our world made a turning point and no one really sensed it, although it’s more obvious now than then.

In the European war, the horrors of the Nazis (to say nothing of “Uncle Joe” Stalin) were bad, but the combatants at least the shared legacy of European, Christian civilisation.  (And yes, contrary to what others say, the Holocaust was a classic breakdown of same.)  The various constituents of the Old World still had enough national spirit to fight for themselves, but it was the last throw.  Europe, having drowned itself in blood twice in a half century, had had enough, and its unwillingness to effectively resist those who would overrun it, either the Russians after the war or the Islamicists now, was the result of that.

In the Pacific, we saw the elements of every confrontation we’ve had with the non-European world since.  The Japanese were driven by fanatical shame-honour; they fought to nearly the last man in every amphibious invasion, and then came up with the kamikaze suicide planes.  We saw the same suicidal tendencies (and the goal of taking the enemy with them) with al-Qaeda, along with the fanatical shame-honour that characterises the Middle East.  Before the war Japanese school children were drilled to become soldiers, much like their Palestinian counterparts today.   The Japanese brutality, although less sophisticated than its German counterpart, was harsher in many ways, and it’s poisoned Asian geopolitics since.

We fought guerilla wars in jungles, which should have been proper preparation for Vietnam but wasn’t.  And finally Asia is becoming the centre of the world.  The colonial and semi-colonial states such as China, the Phillippines, Singapore, Malaysia (Malaya,) Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar (Burma,) India and Japan itself are now significant players on the world stage.

But we still focus on Europe.  The example of the referenced article underscores this: the European monuments are kept up while the Pacific ones rot.  Our élites still are too focused on Europe, its opinion and its way, and that sadly includes the Imitation European in the White House.  We need to take our race-skewed glasses off and look across the Pacific–and while we’re doing it, not forget the sacrifice of those who fought there so many years ago.

It seems that the issue of Sonia Sotomayor’s idea about the relation between her ethnicity, gender and life experiences and her decisions on the bench won’t go away.  Why?  Because she keeps bringing it up:

The federal appeals court judge divulged new details about her finances and provided three decades of writings, speeches and rulings that give both supporters and critics fresh fodder for the coming debate on her confirmation. They include more instances in which she said she hopes a “wise Latina” would reach a better decision than a man without that experience.

The comments in 2002 and 2003 echo a much-criticized remark she made in 2001 at the University of California-Berkeley law school that has prompted a furor among conservatives who say they suggest President Barack Obama’s first Supreme Court nominee brings a personal bias to her legal decisions.

Obama has said he is “sure she would have restated it.” In fact, she said it almost precisely the same way in speeches to the Princeton Club in 2002 and one at Seton Hall law school in 2003, according to copies she sent the Senate.

There are many, especially on the right, that think she should disclaim (that’s a nice legal term, isn’t it) her statements along these lines.  But I don’t think so.

To start with, she’s said it so many times, to take it back wouldn’t be very credible.  There are enough smoke and mirrors in American politics not to add this.

Beyond that, it should be obvious that everyone is a product of their life experiences, and those life experiences do influence how one does one’s job, irrespective of what that job might be.

Instead we need to take her premises–express and implied–and work from there.

The constant drumbeat for nearly half a century is that white people have created an inherently evil, unequal, and unjust system in this country that has to be rectified by tilting the table in the opposite direction through all kinds of state action.  To a large extent, such a thesis underlies the appeal of her idea.  That being the case, let’s stipulate that, in voting for Sonia Sotomayor, we’re voting in favour of such a thesis, and let the senators vote accordingly.  If they want to vote for her but need cover, they can take solace in the fact that not a few Americans voted for Barack Obama with the same implied thesis in the back of their minds.

Putting it in those terms would, in effect, put our country through the same kind of transition that South Africa went through when apartheid was abolished in the last decade.

I might quickly add that I’ve made, in a roundabout way, a parallel case within Evangelical Christianity.  If we look at the demographics of Evangelicals here and elsewhere, it becomes evident that it’s time for those of European descent to “pass the torch” to the rest of the Body of Christ, and to do so in a graceful way.  Unfortunately too much of our agenda as Evangelicals is geared to the needs of one specific group, and if we’re serious about being all things to all men, our leadership needs to reflect that.  That a big reason why the whole saga of the Africans and the North American Anglicans is such a thrill (I’ll bet that TEC’s Presiding Bishop would take exception to that!)

The trout in the milk is that Sotomayor is an Ivy Leaguer, which undercuts the whole concept of real diversity.  If everyone who amounts to anything is a product of a small group of universities, all you’ve done is change the nature of the exclusive club, not abolish it.  But that’s just another day of smoke and mirrors in American politics.